Meissner backs up Eskom

November 2000 News

Local electricity giant, Eskom, has renewed its preferred uninterruptible power supply (UPS) maintenance deal with Meissner. At Eskom's Matla Power Station, just outside Kriel, six Meissner UPSs ensure quick response to power failures.

"Our relationship with Meissner started in 1996 when we had to replace our existing UPSs which started to malfunction due to battery failure," explains Kevin Kriel, Electrical Project Manager at Matla Power Station. "Over the past four years we have added to our UPS arsenal in order to cope with additional loads."

A 60 kVA UPS serves as back-up for each of the six units' scada/alarm panels at the plant. Each unit is responsible for the generating and distribution of 600 MW of power.

Matla power station is a generating facility, meaning that the power generated at the plant is passed on to a substation from where users are provided with electricity. The plant reports an average of two power failures during any one month, making the necessity for UPS power obvious. Should a power failure occur, the UPSs ensure that the unit's IT system is up and running.

"With UPS power we are able to analyse the problem and determine where it was encountered. It allows us to assess what happened during and after the failure," says Kriel. "Without the ability to do this we would waste a great deal of time to locate and rectify the fault.

"In the electricity business especially, downtime due to faulty units is restricted to an absolute minimum. Once our engineering unit discovers a fault or performance problem with any of the UPSs, it is up to Meissner to sort out the problem in such a way that virtually no downtime is encountered," concludes Kriel.

For details, contact Meissner's Paul Ashworth on tel: (011) 392 1642 or e-mail: [email protected]; or Kevin Kriel of Matla Power Station on tel: (017) 612 6205 or e-mail: [email protected]

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